Something Wicked This Way Came
Web problems, Derren Brown, that volcano and Philip Pullman.
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Ideas for the Future
I’m borrowing the theme/title from Trinity Week for this piece, partly because of the great event I got to do with Philip Reeve and Conor Kostick last Tuesday, and partly ‘cos it fits nicely with the other stuff I want to talk about . . . An article I read recently on Publishers Weekly about new apps for the…
Unidentified Inflated Objects
Trim Hot Air Balloon Festival and some military applications.
Almost as Strange as Fiction
In ‘Small-Minded Giants’, I described a city built in the form of a machine that could generate electricity using the movement and activity of the people living within in it. Since then I learned about a train station in Tokyo where they had a very simple version of this idea built into the floor at the ticket barriers, the…
It's Transport, But Not As We Know It
Anyone who knows me, or has read any of my books, will know that I have an interest in unusual machines – well, anything unusual really, but machines too. Here are a few that have grabbed my attention lately. One of our Weird-Wide News roving reporters sent me this link – a bit of film about a New Zealand…
Weathering the Storm
Why is it so hard to make money from something that so many people love so much? What is it about books that they put those who love them most through the mill? It can be hard to love books sometimes. I learned the other day that the Hughes & Hughes bookshop chain is closing down – in fact…
Seizing the Means of Production – Part 3
To recap from Part 1 (of my ambitious and epic blog trilogy) what a publisher traditionally does for a writer is: first, they take that story on. That approval is, in itself, a recognition that the story is of a reasonable quality. Then they hone it into something they can sell, produce the printed matter and distribute it to…
Seizing the Means of Production – Part 2
The issue of what, and more importantly how children will read in the future is a battle – not just for hearts and minds, but also for attention spans. In this, the second of this three-part post, I’ll outline how I believe this change in reading will shape publishing as we know it, and how those of us working…
Seizing The Means of Production – Part 1
I’m going to post this in three parts – blogging is meant to be an exercise in short, sharp writing and I’m tackling a complicated issue. That brevity in writing will be part of what I want to talk about. In this post, I’d like to put forward an outline of what publishing has been up until now, and…
Kellogg's Funny Faces at Hughes & Hughes
The Kelloggs Storytime Launch, in association with Hughes & Hughes and the O’Brien Press.